Fighting Fear with Guns: An Evaluation of the "War on Terror"

[Writer]

What is a “war on terror?” What existential machinery is in place to create an entire military exercise against a simple emotion? And whose terror are we fighting? If it’s the terror caused by terrorists, or those in the business of crafting terror, then are we not actually fighting the horror they wage? Has this entire exercise been mislabeled – are we actually waging a “war on horror?”

A “war on terror” introduces a great paradox, as it is only the victims of terrorism that feel terror. As our soldiers patrol Iraq, weaponry in hand, they do not hunt for a person, nor a bomb, nor a safehold for Osama bin Laden – they hunt for what creates fear. Yet fear lies in us, so in essence, we hunt for ourselves. We hunt for a nation that has long sheltered itself from hardship and worried about triviality. For at least a decade, since the end of the Cold War, we curled into ourselves, our eyes shut, failing truly to understand the rest of the world. Our leaders embraced the world, creating a so-called “New World Order,” yet we citizens lost our sense of history, and with that, a sense of our place in the world.

We’re only a little more than two-hundred years removed from the time we ourselves were terrorists. We waged horror on our English governors because we felt the weight of intolerable disagreement and oppression. Eventually we picked up armaments and fought them. I suppose one can justify the horror we waged because it led to self-government and what we call democracy, yet our choice of ends changes little about the means we used to get there. And every society chooses a different end when they wage a revolutionary battle.

Bush posits a false dichotomy: that the antithesis to horror is American democracy. Yet he misses the entire point of why terrorists wage horror on civilians. Their goal is not a triumvirate governing system, with checks and balances and men in powdered wigs, but something more human – self-determination. They seek the ability to steer their lives without western influence, that the oil under their feet will go to feed their poor, and that one day what they view as a great Zionist scourge in the Middle East will leave their land.

Their goals are idealistic, imperfect, hateful, but very human. Yet to say that we Americans possess none of those qualities when we fight would be disingenuous. For it is our ideals, as imperfect as they are, that lead to hateful battles with a society from which we turned our attentions away not too long ago. And as the Abu Ghraib photos, or the rape and killing of a 14 year-old Iraqi girl, or the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead prove, the lives of humans seem so disposable when hate clouds our view of them.

An image comes to mind – that of an infantryman standing before a mirror, his gun in hand, aiming and ready to shoot. If it is our own fears we wish to battle, then his gun is meant to shoot at us; for our fears, our terror, compels us to travel overseas and fight the horrormakers. We fight the fear of death, the fear of loss of liberties, and the fear of unfamiliar Islam.

Yet no battle or war will ever be complete without eventually facing our own qualities, and how those qualities compel us to fight desperately what actually lies within all of us. Eventually we may see that our own fear and hatred compounds the horror, and that the “war on terror” is actually a war against ourselves. Eventually this war will lead to our own destruction.

[Writer]

1. Any rubs for effort?

:shrug: